What do UX designers do?
Unfortunately the answer is that many UX designers don’t do UX anymore.
User Experience Designing is the designing of the whole user experience, and the confusion happens when people confuse design with visual design. Design is a process that may have multiple outputs, many of which are non visual.
What a User Experience Designer should do is architect a solution through user research, workshops, team work and through using a diverse tool set of skills, such as information architecture and content strategy. They should know why the project does what it does and why it does it from a users perspective.
Traditionally, and for good reason, a good UXer will hand across a set of blueprints (wireframes etc) for implementation specialists to work from. Implementation specialists include developers (front and back) and visual designers.
Also UX does not mean just web! If a person is a UX designer who does not user research, goes straight to code and visual design and only works in web then they are not a UX designer but a Web Designer.
In short – a lot of UX designers out there don’t do much UX.
Why do modern keyboards have Scroll Lock?
The Scroll Lock key is useless in the modern day, and some higher-end keyboards don’t even have it:
Same can be said for the Pause and Break keys, but however it pauses the BIOS POST output on many computers, so it’s a use…
Why do modern keyboards have Scroll Lock?
The Scroll Lock key is useless in the modern day, and some higher-end keyboards don’t even have it:
Same can be said for the Pause and Break keys, but however it pauses the BIOS POST output on many computers, so it’s a use…
Checkbox vs toggle
There’s a constant debate on checkbox vs toggle.
Personally, as an iPhone and Mac owner, I’m still very confused every time when I see the toggle. I often ask ask myself, “The ‘on’ is on the left, does that mean I have to …
Is Axure RP the best tool for UX out there?
No. Axure is buggy and difficult to learn.
UX Pin is now the best tool out there, even if less capable for programming complexe interactions.
The “Create new iteration” feature alone makes it superior to Axure. (picture bellow).
One button for two actions
I have a comparison site. On the landing page there are two text boxes which are used for products to be compared, and a button to trigger “compare”.
If a visitor fills these two boxes, products are compared according to the…
Focus the user on save screen, or still show preview?
In my 3 screens below, I’ve shown the edit, review and save screens. These screens are part of a 4 stage process.
On the final screen (save), instead of the interface having a new screen, a sidebar slide animates in on the …
The design and implementation of the purely theoretical "self destruct" button
I had an Adobe Flash instructor in college who told me a story about getting bored at work. He had some downtime and was looking for a way to pass the time. While looking at some Flash code, he discovered that if you created an executable file with a couple of lines of code you could create a program that would perpetually reboot the users computer. So, armed with his new found knowledge, that’s exactly what he did and promptly asked one of his friends to try out this new program he created. My response was, “You created a self destruct button.”
Now, he did this just for fun. Just like I’m asking this question just for fun.
Ever since, and quite often, when I’m working with developers I ask them if they included a self destruct button. I will then get one of two responses, either a blank stare or a simple “No”. So I’m convinced the only people I can turn to are UX professionals. Which brings me to my question, which I’ll phrase from a UX standpoint.
What user scenario(s) could prompt the inclusion of self destruct button? How would you as a UX professional go about designing/implementing the self destruct button? Finally, and most importantly, what would it do? If you wanted to take it a step farther, how would you calculate conversions/success?
Remember this is purely theoretical and just for fun, so the answers can follow suit, but they should still have some basis in reality (just a little is good).
If we use the story as an example, the scenario that prompted the self destruct button was a developer with too much time on his hands. The design process was simple: create an executable with a line of code. We all know by this point what the executable file did. If you’re curious, according to the story the implementation was a complete success and rebooted the machine over a 100 times before being unplugged and summoning IT. So, the 100 reboots would be the conversions and the calling of IT would be the success metric.
Form Label – disabled or enabled?
What is the best practice when it comes to a form having disabled fields? Should we show the associated labels disabled as well?
1) If labels are also disabled then it’ll give a stronger clue to the user wherein just by look…
How to manage credentials information to the user?
I’ve created a plugin for an editor.
This plugin gets some information from the project and shows you all the related issues, getting the information from an external application (Github, gitlab, redmine, etc).
In the plugin, I have two “objects”: Credentials (to get the issues) and External applications.
Sometimes I can guess how to get the information only with the user supplied credentials (i.e.: github, or gitlab cloud service), sometimes I need extra information (a local gitlab, redmine, etc).
My question is.. How do I show this configuration to the user?
I was thinking about having a third object called “Location”. The idea was the following: the user configures different locations (i.e: “work gitlab -> 100.1.1.23”,”home redmine -> 127.0.0.1), and assigns some credentials to them (“work gitlab” has the authentication tokens A,B and C while redmine has only the autentication token D, etc).
When the user creates a new project in the IDE, the plugin scans the project files (“.git/config”) to see if the project is related to any configured location.
If that’s true, the plugin gets the issues automatically, otherwise it asks the user for the new data.
Another idea is do nothing…In any new project, the user would have to configure the credentials and the external application that will use them.
Is this approach correct? Does anyone have a better idea?